


Alternative Approaches

by smarshtastic



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blackwatch Era, Dubious Morality, Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Post-Mission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-21
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-05-26 15:42:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15004061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smarshtastic/pseuds/smarshtastic
Summary: Jesse gets an encrypted text from Shiga on his personal comm:Sooooo, where do we draw the official line between “necessary casualties” and murder?---Certain members of Blackwatch have a slightly less rigid adherence to morality.





	Alternative Approaches

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fabrega](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabrega/gifts).



> Day 5 of [Blackwatch Week](https://blackwatchweek.tumblr.com/): Order/Chaos! Fabrega and I are doing our best to turn this into Fred Shiga Appreciation Week >_>
> 
> Thank you and a big ol' shout out to [fabrega](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabrega/) for being an incredible beta and better friend ♥ 
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](http://wictorwictor.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/smarshtastic)!

It’s not an ideal situation, but Blackwatch is used to non-ideal scenarios, and they don’t have a lot of options at the moment. It’s been an unusually busy few weeks; Gabe is off on an undercover assignment and, as usual, has left Jesse in charge in his absence. Neither of them could have anticipated the amount of crap that popped up - something about the warmer weather or maybe just the change of season draws out the most unsavory of characters. It’s kept them busy; all hands on deck. 

Jesse doesn’t think anything of sending Dr. O’Deorain, Genji, and Shiga out on an assignment. It’s a straightforward retrieval: a scientist feeding information to a group of environmental terrorists who got in over their head. Blackwatch has to pull the scientist out of their embedded position and bring them in for questioning. Dr. O’Deorain makes sense for the job since she’s had experience up against this particular group of terrorists. Genji has been itching for something to do and can always be relied upon for his efficiency. 

Jesse mostly sends Shiga along with them as a voice of reason. 

For the first couple of days, Jesse doesn’t hear anything unusual. The assignment seems to be going all according to plan; the team located the base of operations in which the scientist was being held and were conducting surveillance before they made any attempt to infiltrate. The team makes all their regular check ins. Nothing unusual comes up in their reports. 

And then Jesse gets an encrypted text from Shiga on his personal comm:

_ Sooooo, where do we draw the official line between “necessary casualties” and murder? _

Jesse blinks at the message. He pulls up the most reports from their mission log. He scans it again, looking for specific references to casualties but doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary. He texts Shiga back:

_ Theoretically? _

Shiga doesn’t respond immediately, which is only mildly worrying. This isn’t the sort of mission that requires a high degree of competency, but they also expected that the team wouldn’t be in regular contact given the remoteness of their target. Shiga probably doesn’t have reception. There’s no need for Jesse to worry. 

Still, out of an abundance of caution, Jesse keeps all the comm lines open and prioritizes incoming messages from Shiga, Shimada, and Dr. O’Deorain. He goes back to his own reports. 

Jesse’s comm pings. 

_ No, like in practice. Like when does it become murder-murder? _

Jesse blinks. Not for the first time, he wonders how he ended up with a life like this. 

_ Everything okay, Fred? _

Jesse stares at his comm for a few moments, but, once again, Shiga doesn’t text back immediately. 

Jesse doesn’t hear back from Shiga for the rest of the day. His worry mounts the longer time stretches on, but then the team checks in at the end of the day like they normally do - nothing unusual to report. The scientist is in custody and they’ll begin making their way back to base. 

Shortly after the report comes in, Jesse gets another text. 

_ I’ll fill you in when we get back _ . 

That, at least, is slightly reassuring. Jesse files their mission log and refocuses on the rest of the paperwork that stacked up during the day. He doesn’t envy Gabe’s job on most days, and today is no exception. He wishes he had been the one to take the undercover job instead. He works on paperwork until his head aches, all but forgetting the strange texts from Shiga. Eventually, he crawls into the bed he normally shares with Gabe and falls asleep as he’s reading an old Ursula le Guin paperback. 

The next day is as normal as any other day in Blackwatch; more paperwork, more of the typical intrigue, and an argument with Overwatch proper about just  _ how much _ ammunition they need. Though Jesse is tempted to leave that particular argument for Gabe when he gets back, he’s personally invested in the outcome, so he spends most of the day compiling data and usage reports to justify their spending. 

Dr. O’Deorain, Shimada, and Shiga return that evening with the scientist in tow. Jesse goes to meet them, mostly to check in on Shiga and make sure everything is actually okay. The scientist looks a little worse for wear, but it’s to be expected after months of being embedded with environmental terrorists, who apparently didn’t believe in personal hygiene. 

“Welcome back,” Jesse says as other agents take the scientist into custody - and hopefully to a place where he can get a shower. Shiga looks surprised to see Jesse in the hangar. 

“Where’s my red carpet?” Shiga asks. 

“Very funny. Debrief?”

“I’d prefer to debrief in the morning,” Dr. O’Deorain says. She looks uncharacteristically ruffled - field work does not suit her, and Jesse can only imagine the hardship it must have been for her to be out in the middle of nowhere without simple amenities like erlenmeyer flasks and bunsen burners. He tries not to grin at the mental image, but it’s hard not to. He looks instead at Shimada and Shiga. 

“I wouldn’t mind a hot shower,” Shiga says. Shimada nods. 

“Alright,” Jesse says, feeling generous. Honestly, he’s relieved that everyone came back in one piece after Shiga sent those encrypted texts - even their target. He’ll be interested to hear the debrief, but it doesn’t have to be right this moment. “First thing in the morning, then. Dismissed.”

Dr. O’Deorain leaves before Jesse even finishes saying the words. Shimada is on her heels, though he does give Jesse a short nod on his way out - practically friendly. Shiga dawdles, or at least doesn’t zoom away. 

“Is the commander back yet?”

Jesse shakes his head. “Not yet. Why?”

“Just wondering. See you in the morning, Jesse.”

“Rest up, Fred.”

Jesse watches Shiga go, brow furrowing slightly. Shiga whistles on his way out of the hangar. The tune echoes in the big open space even after he’s gone. 

Before Jesse turns in for the night, he checks in on the scientist to make sure they’re properly logged and secured. The scientist mostly looks grateful for a cot and some running water too, so Jesse leaves them in Containment’s capable hands and heads back to the room he shares with Gabe. It might be small, but it feels empty when he’s not there - it’s strange not to bump into anyone when Jesse’s brushing his teeth. His thoughts drift away from Shiga’s texts and back to that feeling of missing Gabe. He hopes the undercover mission will wrap up soon. 

Jesse turns out all the lights except for the one on their nightstand and picks up his reading tablet. He reads for a little bit, until his eyes grow heavy. He reaches over, flicks off the lamp, gathers one of Gabe’s old sweatshirts to his chest in lieu of the real thing and drifts off to sleep. 

A persistent knocking rouses Jesse some time later. Jesse lifts his head groggily. He reaches out for his comm, but there aren’t any missed messages. The time reads 3:24AM. The knocking continues. With a groan, Jesse drags himself out of bed. 

“This better be an emergency,” Jesse says, loud enough to be heard on the other side of the door before he opens it. He turns on the light as he opens the door, squinting against the sudden brightness. 

When the door slides open, Shiga gives Jesse a sheepish wave. 

“Hi. Sorry.”

“Is it an emergency?” Jesse asks. Shiga shuffles on the spot. 

“No. I mean - well. No, it’s not. But I wanted to talk to you before the debrief,” Shiga says. Jesse rubs at his eyes.

“You better come in then,” he says, standing back so Shiga can step inside. He does so, after a moment of hesitation in which Jesse’s sleepy brain strongly considers shutting the door in his face. Instead, Jesse gestures to the sofa as the door slides shut behind them. 

“So, this is your place, huh?” Shiga says, looking around instead of sitting down immediately. He’s always nosy - it gets him into trouble, and, at this hour, Jesse has no patience for it. “You and Commander Reyes?”

“We’ve lived together for over a year, Fred,” Jesse says flatly. He flops down on the sofa and tilts his head back against the back cushion. He closes his eyes, wishing he was asleep. 

“Right, right. I know that. We just never had a house warming or anything.”

“What do you want to say to me that you didn’t want to say in the debrief we are having in four hours?” Jesse asks, picking up his head again. Shiga sits gingerly in the edge of the sofa. 

“Well, um. You got my texts, right?”

“I responded to them, didn’t I?”

“Yeah. Right! So - you know. Murder,” Shiga says, bobbing his head. Jesse gives him a look. 

“ _ Murder-murder _ or pretend murder?” Jesse says. Shiga makes a face. 

“Very funny.”

“It’s three in the morning, Fred. Cut to the chase.”

“Sorry - yeah. It’s just - I know we’re a shadowy black ops organization and all that, and getting our hands dirty is kind of our specialty and all but like, also, it’s not like we actually  _ enjoy _ killing people, it’s just sort of a byproduct of the job, right? Shit happens, but we always try to limit the number of casualties ‘cause, you know, it’s hard to disappear a bunch of bodies when you’re supposed to be super top secret and all,” Shiga says. 

“Fred.”

“Sorry! Listen, I’m just saying. I’ve made peace with that part of the job. But there was something about the way Dr. O’Deorain and Shimada tackled that particular task that I would describe as… worrying.”

“Meaning?”

“They kind of liked it? I think?”

Jesse rubs a hand over his face. “I’ll talk to them.”

“Okay, but you can’t say it was me -”

“I said I’ll talk to them, Fred,” Jesse says, then softens. “Look, I don’t like that part of the job either. It’s like you said - a necessary evil, that we try to avoid when possible. If we can do a job without killing anyone, then we should.”

Shiga nods vigorously. “Right! Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“So we’ll have the conversation during the debrief,” Jesse says. He lets his breath out. “Is there anything particular I should know?”

“No. I mean, it’s really just the whole limit casualties thing. It kind of felt like they went out of their way to make a mess,” Shiga says. Jesse frowns. He makes a mental note to check the details of their reports again. 

“Anything we have to worry about?”

Shiga shakes his head with a grimace. “No witnesses.”

“Well,” Jesse says. He makes a face. “We’ll address it.”

“Thanks Jesse. I appreciate it, really,” Shiga says. “It’s not like we have some kind of HR department we can go to with these sorts of concerns.”

Jesse snorts. “Yeah, that’d be something to see,” he says. “Anything else? More bodies to bury?”

“Just the ones I already told you about,” Shiga says. He pops up from the sofa. “Sorry for waking you.”

Jesse waves a hand as he stands up. “It’s my job or whatever.”

Shiga grins at him. “At least we don’t actually have bodies to bury.”

“This time.”

Shiga lets out a surprised little laugh. “Yeah, but I know you’d grab a shovel to help me out.”

“Go get some sleep, Fred,” Jesse says, shaking his head and smiling in spite of himself. Shiga gives him a mock salute. 

“Good night, Acting Commander McCree.”

This time, Jesse does actually shut the door in his face. 

=-=-=

Jesse is first to the debriefing room, with the largest mug of coffee he could get his hands on. He sits at the head of the table and scrolls through the mission report. Dr. O’Deorain penned it, though Shiga had submitted his own supplement. It’s not that their reports are drastically different, exactly, but the way in which Dr. O’Deorain characterized the events of their mission versus the way Shiga characterized them - well. It gives Jesse pause. Shimada didn’t bother writing anything, which isn’t necessarily surprising, but a third perspective on what went down would be helpful. 

Jesse has a hunch that he’s not ever going to get a clear picture of what happened on the mission. 

Dr. O’Deorain arrives to the debriefing room first, sitting down in a seat a little ways down the table from Jesse. She gives him a stiff but polite nod. 

“Good morning,” she says. She looks much more refreshed than she had coming off the shuttle last night. 

“Morning,” Jesse says. “Happy to be back to civilization?”

“Thrilled,” Dr. O’Deorain says dryly. Jesse takes a sip of coffee to hide his smile. He knows Dr. O’Deorain would much,  _ much _ prefer to stay in the lab - field work is not her favorite thing - but, in an all-hands sort of situation, they don’t have a choice. 

“Hopefully things calm down some,” Jesse says. Shimada comes in and slides into a seat at the very end of the table. He’s wearing one of the oversized sweatshirts with sleeves that come down over his hands and the hood drawn up over his forehead. Though Shimada has begun to get a lot more comfortable with his new body, he still doesn’t love walking around so exposed. Jesse can see the glint of his eyes under the hood - he’s not wearing his mask, either. He nods to him. “Welcome back.”

Shimada gives Jesse a nod and slouches down a little bit in his seat. Jesse checks the time on his comm. Predictably, Shiga is late. He finally strolls in with his own cup of coffee. 

“Glad you could join us,” Jesse says. Shiga gives Jesse a grin and raises his mug to him. “Let’s get started. I have some questions about your report, Dr. O’Deorain.”

Dr. O’Deorain raises an eyebrow. “Yes?”

Jesse glances down at his tablet. “Says here that upon the team’s initial contact with the target, there were some unexpected complications. You mind elaborating on that?”

“Before we were able to make contact with the target, a group of terrorists stopped us for questioning,” Dr. O’Deorain says, her voice even. “After we circumvented the terrorists -”

“How did you ‘circumvent’ the terrorists?” Jesse interrupts. Dr. O’Deorain blinks at him. 

“The initial plan was no longer tenable. So we disposed of them.”

Jesse pinches the bridge of his nose. “Did you attempt any other methods before you  _ disposed _ of them?”

“It was more efficient to remove them from the situation entirely,” Dr. O’Deorain says. 

“How many casualties?” Jesse asks. 

“Six or seven.”

“Total? For the whole mission?”

“Twenty one,” Shimada pipes up from the end of the table. Out of the corner of his eye, Jesse sees Shiga make some sort of sudden movement in his seat. Jesse very carefully avoids looking directly at him. 

“Now, I know that we don’t follow a lot of rules when it comes to how we do things,” Jesse says slowly. He meets Dr. O’Deorain’s eyes. “But generally speaking, we try to limit the amount of murder we commit on a daily basis.”

“Over the course of the mission, casualties averaged less than three a day,” Dr. O’Deorain says. Jesse stares at her, letting the silence stretch on to the point of discomfort. Shimada is practically squirming in his seat. 

“Okay,” Jesse says finally. “I can’t believe I have to say this, but Blackwatch doesn’t condone murder.”

“Any casualties we incurred were in the interest of completing the mission.”

“This was a mission where we didn’t need to incur  _ any _ casualties,” Jesse says. Dr. O’Deorain looks totally unconcerned. Shimada folds his arms over his chest, slouching further down in his seat. Jesse leans forward to look at him. “We don’t always have to go in guns blazing. Sometimes we can just do the job without killing people. Plan B isn’t automatically ‘kill everything in sight.’”

Neither Dr. O’Deorain nor Shimada seem convinced. 

“What about that time -” Shimada starts to say, but Jesse cuts him off. 

“There are times when it’s appropriate,” Jesse says. “But Overwatch is, first and foremost, a peacekeeping organization. We’re supposed to limit the number of casualties we incur.”

Nobody says anything for a long time. Jesse sighs and shakes his head. 

“I’m going to put all of you on probation,” he says. “No field work until Commander Reyes comes back to review the mission report.”

Shimada sits up straight. “But -”

“We’re not murderers, we’re not assassins,” Jesse says. “Sorry, Shimada. This mission might’ve been a success, but getting there was messier than we like. Black ops, covert ops, whatever you want to call it - we’re supposed to clean up messes. Not make more of them.”

Jesse looks from Dr. O’Deorain to Shimada to Shiga, who looks mildly relieved. 

“Dismissed, then.”

=-=-=

In the days that follow the debriefing, Jesse expects pushback from the team, but is pleasantly surprised that he hears no grumblings from either Dr. O’Deorain or Shiga. Dr. O’Deorain seems wholly content to stay in her lab. Shiga throws himself into reports with a level of gusto that Jesse finds mildly worrying. When Jesse asks him about, Shiga shrugs. 

“Look, I’m just glad I don’t need to get a shovel and start burying bodies myself,” Shiga says. “I don’t mind the desk work for a few days.”

Out of the three of them, Shimada is the most disgruntled by Jesse’s decision. He spends the vast majority of this time in the training simulators. Jesse’s just glad that he’s taking his frustration out on bots instead of people. 

Eventually, Gabe comes back from his undercover op and even though Jesse doesn’t want to overwhelm him on his first day back, he’d rather get this resolved sooner rather than later. 

Gabe is showering while Jesse sits on the closed lid of the toilet, talking to him over the sound of the water. 

“So anyway, Fred texts me asking me what we consider  _ murder-murder _ and it turns out Shimada and O’Deorain killed 21 people on their Greenland mission,” Jesse says. Gabe pokes his head out of the shower. 

“How many people?”

“Twenty one,” Jesse says again. Gabe blinks then withdraws back into the shower. “I pulled them from fieldwork.”

Gabe sighs. He shuts off the water and Jesse hands him a towel. 

“Twenty one?”

“Twenty one,” Jesse nods. Gabe makes a face, toweling himself off. 

“Well, you did the right thing,” Gabe says. 

“So I’m not overreacting?” 

“I mean, we do tend to get our hands dirty,” Gabe says. “21 seems excessive.” 

“A bit.” 

Gabe wraps the towel around his waist and comes over to Jesse. He kisses the corner of his mouth. When he pulls away, he cups Jesse’s cheek. 

“You did the right thing,” Gabe says. “You did good, Jesse.”

The corner of Jesse’s mouth quirks up. 

“You’re not going to assign me to desk duty too?”

“Nah,” Gabe says, moving past Jesse and back into their bedroom. “I’ll talk to them as a formality tomorrow. Maybe give them some shovels, see how they like burying bodies.”

Jesse blinks, then grins, trotting after Gabe. 

“I knew I liked you for a reason,” Jesse says. Gabe laughs. He tugs a clean shirt over his head. 

“That’s why you like me?”

“Well, not the  _ only _ reason,” Jesse says. He slips his arms around Gabe’s waist. “I’m glad you’re back. I hate being in charge.”

“But it looks good on you,” Gabe says. He kisses Jesse properly this time, full on the lips. Jesse lets his eyes close for a moment. 

“Maybe. But it’s better when it’s both of us.”

“Mm, you make a good point,” Gabe chuckles and kisses Jesse again. “Any other issues you saved for my return?”

“I’ll save the mountain of reports for tomorrow. For tonight, though, I have one important issue,” Jesse says, already dragging Gabe by the shirt to their bed. Gabe lets him, a smile playing at his lips. 

“Another body to bury?”

Jesse groans. “Don’t joke!”

“Alright, alright,” Gabe laughs. He pushes Jesse gently down on the bed and kisses him until they’re both breathless. Jesse pulls away to give Gabe a look. 

“If there’s anyone I’d trust to bury a body, though, it’s you.”

“Love you too, Jesse.”


End file.
